I do not know what the missing class is or why it is missing. I installed
everything according to the documentation.

If I try to start Elasticsearch without the service (bin/elasticsearch -f),
it does start. However, the first time I try to do anything substantial,
such as index a document, I get a "java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap
space" error, and the server crashes. I tried increasing the memory
allocation in the bin/service/elasticsearch.conf file, but this had no
effect (which I assume is because I'm not launching it via the service).

I don't really need the service, I just need to get something running
temporarily in order to do testing.

I could not find any information about any of these errors in the
Elasticsearch documentation. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Lets start from the service wrapper, what you do use the latest service
wrapper with elasticsearch 0.18.x, the latest servicewrapper supports 0.19.

Regarding the OOM. When you run ES using the bin/elasticsearch script, all
the memory and settings exists in the elasticsearch.in.sh file, not the
servicewrapper one. By default though, the max memory is 1gb, so its
strange that for indexing a single doc you get OOM. What exactly are you
indexing?

I do not know what the missing class is or why it is missing. I installed
everything according to the documentation.

If I try to start Elasticsearch without the service (bin/elasticsearch
-f), it does start. However, the first time I try to do anything
substantial, such as index a document, I get a "java.lang.OutOfMemoryError:
Java heap space" error, and the server crashes. I tried increasing the
memory allocation in the bin/service/elasticsearch.conf file, but this had
no effect (which I assume is because I'm not launching it via the service).

I don't really need the service, I just need to get something running
temporarily in order to do testing.

I could not find any information about any of these errors in the
Elasticsearch documentation. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.